Partition had won, but the representatives of the Jewish Agency were apprehensive about the roadblocks that lay ahead. Aubrey Eban observed that unfortunately, in the Jewish experience, “to regard worst-case contingencies as more real than successful outcomes is our legacy.1 He was right to be wary. Almost from the first day, the U.S. State and Defense establishment waged a relentless campaign to undermine partition and President Truman’s support for it. Returning to Washington after the vote, Epstein wrote to Lillie Shultz that he could “smell that official Washington is not at all jubilant about the decision taken by the U.N. and backed by the White House.” He saw “a great deal of disappointment coupled with bitterness among many people who did not like the idea of a Jewish State and who will not so easily digest it.”2
His observations were confirmed on December 5, when a story appeared in The New York Times reporting that the State Department had announced an embargo on the sale of arms to the Middle East, extending to “arms and ammunition of the US outside this country, such as surplus war property.” They also announced that, although passports were still being issued to Americans who wanted to go to the Middle East for “valid reasons,” they would not be issued to persons who wish “to serve with armed forces not under the United States Government.”
Loy Henderson had suggested the embargo to Marshall on November 10, noting that the Arabs and the Jews would be seeking to buy arms from the United States. “I am of the opinion,” said Henderson, “that in view of the tense situation in Palestine and on its frontiers, we should not permit the export of any material of this nature to Palestine or neighboring states so long as the tension continues.” They would use these arms against one another, and the United States would be subject to “bitter recriminations.” Henderson recommended, effective immediately, that “we suspend authorization for the export from the United States of arms, ammunition and other war material intended for use in Palestine or in neighboring countries, until the situation in that area has become somewhat more clarified.” He assured Marshall that his colleagues in the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs concurred.3 Marshall agreed to it, and it was made public on December 5.4
Truman and the White House staff were taken by surprise, learning about the embargo at the same time as the public. Now Truman was in a bind. He couldn’t contradict his own State Department, because doing so would make him appear to not be in command of his own foreign policy. Moreover, State’s position sounded reasonable, and Truman did want to prevent more bloodshed. In any event, he had little choice but to accept the State’s Department’s new policy.5 Just like State’s recommendation to desist in using U.S. influence for the partition vote, the embargo ultimately worked to the advantage of the Arabs. The British government had no intention of canceling its existing arms contracts with various Arab states, and the Arab armies were already well equipped, having bought more than $37 million of surplus wartime arms from the former Allies.6
The Jews were at a disadvantage. They were raising money and buying arms overseas, but British arms searches and naval blockades made it difficult to get them into Palestine. At the moment, they had a few thousand guns that were scattered throughout the Yishuv, but no heavy armaments, machine guns, artillery, antitank or antiaircraft guns, or armored cars. In such a situation, the arms embargo felt like a nail in their coffin.7 Some made the analogy to FDR’s ban on arms sales to Republican Spain, which had put the republic on the defensive while Italy and Germany gave the Nationalists troops, advisers, and pilots.
In light of these developments, Epstein wrote to Freda Kirchwey that there were many people “in official Washington” who would stop at nothing to sabotage the partition decision. This meant they still had a lot of hard work ahead of them, including the mounting of a massive propaganda effort to popularize the idea of a Jewish state and to show that it would be an asset to both the Western democracies and the United States.
The UN vote for partition had provoked clashes between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews, which resulted in considerable Jewish casualties. The large number of Jewish victims was the result of the “policy of restraint adopted by the Haganah, which is to neither retaliate nor to attack the Arabs, but to stick to the policy of self-defense.” They did not want to give the foes of partition more ammunition by helping the Mufti create major clashes between the Jews and Arabs. The other item on the Agency’s agenda, he told Kirchwey, was even more important: to provide the Yishuv with the necessary arms and equipment for self-defense. It needed arms, not foreign troops. That would prove the best way to “avoid international complications” that might occur if foreign troops moved into Palestine after the British terminated their Mandate, which they had announced they would do on May 15. In light of the situation, Epstein told Kirchwey that it would be useful if she could raise some of these points in a Nation editorial.8
There was no rejoicing for the Arabs after the partition vote, only a resolution to resist. The day after the vote, the Arab Higher Committee called for a three-day general strike of Arabs in Palestine followed by mass demonstrations. On December 5, when the three-day strike was over, the Arabs sporadically began attacking the Jews using Sten and machine guns, focusing on buses, which were now forced to travel in convoys with armored escorts.9 They called upon the Arab world to maintain a complete boycott of all Jews and Jewish products and threatened that “any contact will be regarded as the greatest crime and highest treason against their nation and religion.” The committee’s acting chairman said the Arabs would wage a holy war “if an attempt is made to enforce the partition plan.” In Damascus an Arab mob killed all the members of the Soviet Union’s legation staff. There was unchecked rioting in Syria and Lebanon, and thousands of students demonstrated in Cairo.10
In late December, American Consul Robert Macatee reported from Jerusalem that “terror is prevalent and normal life is disappearing.” One example was particularly chilling. Jews, he wrote, “are picked off while riding in buses, walking along the streets, and stray shots even find them while asleep in their beds. A Jewish woman, mother of five children, was shot in Jerusalem while hanging out clothes on the roof. The ambulance rushing her to the hospital was machine-gunned, and finally the mourners following her to the funeral were attacked and one of them was stabbed to death.” Even so, he reported, the Yishuv was remarkably quiet. Even the Stern Gang waged limited attacks on the British, and the Haganah took only punitive reprisals for especially harmful Arab attacks. The Jewish Agency accused the British of showing partiality to the Arabs, which Macatee thought was accurate. Jews’ requests to organize their own protection were always turned down, he said, and police concentrated on searching Jewish personnel and settlements while ignoring the Arabs. Looking ahead, he warned of what he thought was a “serious preparation” for war by the Arab states.11
Immediately after the U.N. vote on partition, the General Assembly created a five-nation Commission on Palestine, which would assume temporary authority over Palestine and help with the implementation of partition after the British Mandate ended. The commission was composed of Bolivia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Panama, and the Philippines, with Ralph Bunche working as the chief of its secretariat. Heading the commission was the Czech representative, Karl Lisicky, who soon dubbed himself and his colleagues the “five lonely pilgrims.” They were indeed lonely. The committee had planned to go to Palestine in two or three weeks. The Arab Higher Committee responded by announcing that it would boycott the commission. The British then made their task next to impossible by proclaiming that they did not want them there until May 1, only two weeks before Britain was to end its Mandate. Added to this was the escalating violence, which made them fear for their safety.12 David Horowitz observed that “the commissioners were conscious of their helplessness and had no confidence in their ability to cope with the massive forces and situations pitch forked around them. They groped and blundered along in bewilderment.”13
The Jewish Agency was strenuously trying to downplay the violence in Palestine in order to bolster their argument that Jewish Palestine could take care of itself. Truman had been clear that he did not want to send U.S. troops to Palestine and would do so only if they were part of a U.N. police force created by the Security Council.14 But the Jewish Agency’s contention that it would be able to deal with Arab opposition was challenged when its headquarters in Tel Aviv was blown up by explosives planted in the building’s garden. Other explosives had been set off in Haifa and Jerusalem. Armed Arabs now began to cut off Jewish communications and raid Jewish suburbs and settlements. They attacked Jewish convoys going from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem with crucial supplies by putting up barricades and ambushing them.15
To deal with the problems of arms, the Jewish Agency sent Golda Meyerson (Meir) to the United States on an emergency mission to raise money for the Haganah. Meyerson could be counted on to do the most difficult tasks. She had emigrated to Milwaukee from Russia as a young girl and had worked as a teacher before moving to Palestine in 1920. “Stout and striking with black hair knotted in the back and eyes that perpetually reflected an inner sadness,” she was familiar with American Jews and claimed that she would get through to them about the urgency of her request.16 When she arrived, she was immediately squeezed into the program already taking place in Chicago, at a conference of the Council of Jewish Federations. “I have come to try to impress Jews in the United States,” she told the council, “with this fact, that within a very short period, a couple of weeks, we must have in cash between twenty-five and thirty million dollars.” It was a staggering amount. Meyerson traveled throughout the United States, giving the same pitch for money to one Jewish group after another. After two and a half months of constant fund-raising, she returned to Palestine with $50 million.17
Meanwhile, the State Department was busy developing plans and strategies to kill partition in favor of some form of trusteeship. In mid-November, Loy Henderson and George F. Kennan of the State Department got together to prepare a report, “U.S. Security Interests in the Mediterranean and Near East Areas,” which would have widespread circulation. Though Henderson was arguably the most prominent and committed Arabist at State, Kennan was famous in Washington for his “Long Telegram” of 1946, sent by cable from Moscow while he was attached to the U.S. Embassy there. Later made public in an article in Foreign Affairs (in which Kennan wrote under the name “X”), his memo spelled out how the United States should confront Soviet totalitarianism in the new Cold War. Back in Washington, Kennan now turned his sights to the Middle East. Their paper was meant to be, Kennan told Marshall, State’s initial position, which would be presented to the NSC.18
It would also serve as the State Department’s guideline for changing course on partition. Warning that “U.S. support of partition has already brought about loss of U.S. prestige and disillusionment among the Arabs,” they accused partition of being a violation of the principle of self-determination forged by the League of Nations, when many Arab states had been carved out of the Ottoman Empire. Even Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia, they argued, had left the United Nations “in a bitterly anti-American mood” and might now support extremist elements unfriendly to America. The end result would be the endangerment of air bases and U.S. oil concessions. If the United Nations sought to actually implement partition, they warned, moderate Arab leaders would be swept out of power by extremists. Men such as Azzam Bey of the Arab League would be replaced by the likes of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Their hatred of Zionists would then be extended to the entire West “in direct proportion to the latter’s support of Zionist armies…and of partition in particular.”
Assistance by the United States might even be a threat to the success of the Marshall Plan, since the Arabs could cut oil production and such a step would leave little oil for use in Europe. The Soviets could also gain entrée to the Middle East under the pretext of helping maintain order, a step that would give “Communist agents…an excellent base from which to extend their subversive activities.” Even if this did not happen, Henderson and Kennan argued, “the UN decision is favorable to Soviet objectives of sowing dissention and discord in non-Communist countries.” The Soviets would use partition of Palestine as an excuse to partition areas in which they had troops, such as Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Greece, and then set up separate pro-Soviet states. Indeed, they predicted, “the whole structure of peace and security in the Near East and Mediterranean” would be adversely affected.
Partition, they argued, was supposed to lead immediately to a just and workable plan that Arabs and Jews would both support, but since the Arabs would not cooperate, one of the major premises in favor of partition had collapsed. If partition were not given up, anti-Jewish protests in Arab countries would soon extend to the West, providing a place for new “anti-Jewish agitation,” which would interfere with the assimilation of individual Jews into the lives of their respective countries. Jews might then be seen as “an alien political factor.” They explained, “In the U.S., the position of Jews would be gravely undermined as it becomes evident to the public that in supporting a Jewish state in Palestine we were in fact supporting the extreme objectives of political Zionism, to the detriment of overall U.S. security interests.”
The United States would have to face the fact that partition could not take place without outside assistance, and if the United States persisted in supporting it, the government would have to provide economic aid as well as arms and troops. Moreover, the Arab states would view the United States as having announced “a virtual declaration of war” against the Arab world. It would all be for naught. They predicted that “it is improbable that the Jewish state could survive over any considerable period of time in the face of the combined assistance…for the Arabs in Palestine from the Arab states.” Thus, they concluded, the United States “should take no further initiative in implementing or aiding partition”19 (our emphasis). When it became clear to all that partition had no chance of success, the United States should then shift to a new position—that, in the absence of agreement between Jews and Arabs, the matter “should go back to the General Assembly.” The United States could then switch its support to either a federal state or trusteeship.
The paper now circulated at a rapid pace. Dean Rusk made a point that Henderson and Kennan seemed to have overlooked: “A major change in our Palestine policy would require the approval of the President as well as of leading Members of Congress.” To achieve their aims, Rusk argued, they would need to show that “a new situation” (our emphasis) had arisen in Palestine that supported a policy change. In Rusk’s opinion, this new situation had not yet arisen, although he thought it could develop in April as the end of the British Mandate in Palestine grew closer and fighting between Arabs and Jews broke out. This would be the time to suggest alternative lines of action, mainly the “establishment of a United Nations trusteeship for the whole of Palestine.”20 Undersecretary Lovett sent it to James Forrestal, the secretary of defense. Forrestal agreed that the United States was not committed to supporting partition if it meant the use of force and that it was against the country’s interests to give arms to the Jews while an embargo was in effect against supplying arms to the Arabs. Forrestal reached the same conclusion as Henderson and Kennan: “The United States should attempt to have the plan withdrawn as soon as possible.”21
State’s plans to roll back U.S. policy were revealed when The New York Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, James Reston, reported that the Defense and State Departments were concerned that President Truman’s endorsement of partition was “influenced by the political strength of pro-Zionist organizations in key political centers of this country.” Now they were worried that the same Zionist groups might convince the administration to send troops to Palestine to help implement partition. Policy in Palestine, Reston was told, “should not be allowed to jeopardize United States strategic interests in the Middle East.” This included the question of oil, which was in short supply and which James Forrestal had told the House Armed Services Subcommittee was essential to America’s security. The United States currently had to ship oil to Europe through Middle East pipelines, and that was threatened by “the hostile Moslem response to the United Nations partition plan.”
Reston also reported that at present, the administration was not backing away from partition, and some in government even thought the United States should send troops to help implement it. But State and Defense were both strongly opposed to any action that could disturb U.S. relations in the Middle East.22
Among those who read Reston’s article with great concern was Eleanor Roosevelt. “It seems to me,” she wrote Truman, “that if the UN does not pull through and enforce the partition and protection of people in general in Palestine, we are now facing a very serious situation in which its position for the future is at stake.” Mrs. Roosevelt pointed out that the United States had “led in the acceptance of the UN majority report on Palestine,” and thus she favored creation of a U.N. police force that could act when needed. She also told Truman that she thought the United States should end the arms embargo to the Middle East and “provide such things as are essential to the control of Arabs, namely, modern implements of war such as tanks, airplanes, etc.” Britain sought only “to please the Arabs,” she thought, and now was the time to strengthen the United Nations as an instrument of peace.23 Truman did not comment about the first part of her letter. But her statements about the British, Truman told her, “were correct as they can be. Britain’s role in the Near East…has not changed in a hundred years.”24
Truman also received a lengthy report and a visit on February 4 from the ambassador to Iraq, George Wadsworth. Wadsworth had also been a consultant to the U.N. Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine and shared Loy Henderson’s opinions about Palestine. The regent of Iraq, Prince Abdul Illah, had asked Wadsworth to convey his views to Truman, which Wadsworth wrote up in a report sent to Truman in advance of their meeting. The prince was convinced that the United States was responsible for the United Nations’ decision on partition. But he believed that “in spearheading that action the United States was, under Zionist pressure, unfaithful to its own principles…of self-determination and majority rule.” Wadsworth let Truman know he agreed with the prince. As he saw it, the “Arab fear” had to be addressed and removed. “May I not,” Wadsworth asked, “take back with me your personal assurance that the American Government will not support or participate in any project to impose partition by force?” This was necessary, he said, because Middle East oil flow could be affected, and that might harm the Marshall Plan. Like the others, he ended his report to Truman by supporting a U.N. trusteeship over Palestine.25
When Wadsworth sat down with Truman, the president agreed with him that the situation in Palestine warranted concern but, he said, he, Bob Lovett, and General Marshall were watching events closely. The problem, he told Wadsworth, went all the way back to the British double-dealing after the Anglo-American Committee report, which Bevin had pledged to support if a unanimous decision was reached. That had not occurred, for two reasons: it “had failed,” Truman stated, “because of British bullheadedness and the fanaticism of our New York Jews.” One thing he was adamant about, Truman assured him, was that no U.S. troops would be sent to Palestine and that the United States would work through and with the United Nations. That was not enough, Wadsworth replied. To those actually working in the field, partition seemed unworkable and, he said, it should be reconsidered.
To that suggestion, Truman replied that it was for the United Nations to decide. Then he changed the subject. He was most excited about scheduled development projects in the region, such as the Tigris-Euphrates Valley project, in Iraq, which would help get “the world back on its feet.” The United States, Truman assured him, wanted to work with other countries to aid economic development. “For the first time in history,” Truman said, “the conqueror’s policy was to reconstruct the conquered.” But, he added, the “Arab leaders should realize that they have to play their parts to make this possible. There was nothing much constructive anyone could do if they…started sending their armies into Palestine.” The Arabs were worried, Wadsworth pointed out, that the United States would act unilaterally because of Zionist pressure and send in troops. “We won’t,” Truman assured him. “But they [the Arabs] must first assure me, before I can give them any categoric [sic] promises that they won’t either.”26
Truman confided to his friend Oscar R. Ewing, a former vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee who was now serving as administrator of the Federal Security Agency, that he still felt conflicted over what to do in Palestine. “I am in a tough spot,” he told Ewing. “The Jews are bringing all kinds of pressure on me to support the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state. On the other hand the State Department is adamantly opposed to this. I have two Jewish assistants on my staff, Dave Niles and Max Lowenthal. Whenever I try to talk to them about Palestine they soon burst into tears because they are so emotionally involved…. So far I have not known what to do.” He wanted some impartial advice.27
Ewing offered to help. Truman answered, “Oh, I wish you would, I wish you would. It would help a lot.” Ewing was an attorney who claimed not to know much about the situation in Palestine outside what he was reading in the newspapers. As a lawyer, he decided the best approach would be for him to investigate the legal claims that the Arabs and Jews, respectively, had to the land in question. Wadsworth and others had argued with Truman that the Zionist goals might be contrary to international law and that the partition resolution had no constitutional authority to commence with a geographical change in the region. Ewing’s conclusion was that in international law, when land is taken by conquest, the conqueror can dispose of it as he desires. This meant that the sovereignty given by the Allies to the Jews of land taken from Turkey after World War I had as much validity as grants of sovereignty that had been made to the Arab countries. Most important, he concluded, “the claim of the Arabs that Palestine had been their land for thousands of years was untrue.” For hundreds of years it had been Turkish, and after the First World War, the Allies had given part of their conquered land to the Jews, and “their title to it became indisputable.”28
The volume of mail to the White House in support of partition continued to swell. Its sheer volume had ceased to have much effect. One survey showed that in the third quarter of 1947, the White House received 65,000 telegrams, postcards, letters, and petitions. This was exceeded in the next quarter, when it received 70,000.29 By another count, between 1947 and 1948, Truman received 48,600 telegrams, more than 790,000 cards, and 81,000 other pieces of mail on the subject.30 Before the November 29 vote in favor of partition, Truman wrote Senator Claude Pepper (D.–Florida), “I received about thirty-five thousand pieces of mail and propaganda from the Jews in this country while the matter was pending. I put it all in a pile and struck a match to it—I never looked at a single one of the letters because I felt the United Nations Committee was acting in a judicial capacity and should not be interfered with.”31 Truman, obviously, was speaking metaphorically.
On the home front, politics was suddenly up front. In the 24th Congressional District in the Bronx, New York, the representative who held the seat had suddenly died, and a special election for his replacement took place. The administration and the nation were stunned when the results of the mid-February election were announced: the Democratic nominee for the office, Karl Propper, lost by more than 10,000 votes to a third-party candidate, Leo Isaacson, a member of the State Assembly. Isaacson had run on the ticket of the American Labor Party, a group that had been formed to provide a separate ticket for left-wing Democrats to vote on for FDR, even though it was far to the left of the official Democratic program. By the start of the Cold War, the group had split up, and the ALP was now made up of only Communists and fellow travelers. They had been pushing to get Henry A. Wallace, the former secretary of commerce, to run for president on a nationwide third party ticket.
The press took Isaacson’s victory as a sign that in the forthcoming 1948 presidential election, a large Wallace vote could give the election to the Republicans. What it ignored was the unusual nature of Isaacson’s district. It was made up of working-class Jews who were either Communist or socialist and was often referred to as New York’s “red belt.” Moreover, only 35 percent of eligible voters had turned out for the special election, mainly those of the pro-Communist faction. Yet almost everyone saw the vote as a good omen for a Wallace candidacy and evidence that Truman would soon be out of office. The race was also seen as a mandate on Palestine. Speaking publicly, Wallace said of the president that Truman “talks Jewish and acts Arab.” Some observers attributed the vote for Isaacson to dissatisfaction among Jewish voters with Truman’s positions on Palestine to date.32
James Reston shared that view. The main reason these Bronx voters had put Isaacson in, he wrote, was dissatisfaction with the administration’s Palestine policy, especially the arms embargo. They also worried that Truman would not support the formation of a U.N. armed force to fight the Arabs when partition occurred.33
The time was approaching when Senator Austin would have to give his statement on behalf of the U.S. delegation to the Security Council, which would be meeting to consider the majority and minority reports issued by the Commission on Palestine. The State Department sent Truman a working draft that it was proposing for his speech. Truman agreed with most of it, but paragraph 12 caught his eye. It said that if it was impossible to impose partition without force and if the Security Council was unable to work out an agreement between the Arabs and the Jews, the entire matter should be referred back to a special session of the General Assembly. Then it stated, “The Department of State considers that it would then be clear that Palestine is not yet ready for self-government and that some form of UN trusteeship for an additional period of time will be necessary.” On February 21, Truman wrote to Marshall that he approved the approach in principle, but he added a proviso: “I want to make it clear that nothing should be presented to the Security Council that could be interpreted as a recession on our part from the position we took in the General Assembly [for partition]. Send final draft of Austin’s remarks for my consideration” (our emphasis).34
On February 24, Austin delivered an ambiguous and confusing speech at the United Nations. He started out by saying that the United States supported partition but went on to cite potential roadblocks that could lead to its failure. Security Council military action, he stated, could be used only to prevent aggression against Palestine from outside and maintain international peace. It could not be used to enforce an internal matter such as partition.35 The next day, he proposed a draft resolution to the Security Council on the Palestine question to establish a committee made up of the five permanent members of the Council. Their function would be to inform the Council of the situation in Palestine and make recommendations to it.36
U.N. Representative Ben Cohen, who along with Mrs. Roosevelt was a supporter of partition, immediately criticized the implications of Austin’s speech. “Under clouds of legal sophistry,” he wrote, “that pusillanimous address confirmed the fears of many of us that the State Department lacks the will to have our government do its part to make the Palestine settlement work. It confirms the fears of many of us that the State Department is faltering in its support of the United Nations.”37 Senator Francis J. Meyers of Pennsylvania was so upset that he wrote Truman a personal letter to “get this off my chest.” Austin’s speech, he wrote, “gave the impression…that our country is ‘selling out’ the Jewish people and undercutting the UN structure.” Some Democratic leaders in his state had even resigned in protest, and Pennsylvania’s Jews, he reported, “seem to be as bitter against you and the party…as some of our brethren in the South profess to be.” After reading Austin’s speech, Meyers found it guilty of “sloppy draftsmanship, perhaps purposely so.” He did not think the United States had sold out but did find in Austin’s speech “vague, weasel-worded passages so involved and so legalistic and confusing that it is hard to tell just exactly where we stand.” He wanted to support Truman, he said, but he and others were at a great disadvantage “because we just can’t put our finger on the facts.” He reassured Truman that he did not think he was selling out anyone, “and yet,” he concluded, “it is so terribly difficult to find solid facts…on just where we do stand that I am most disturbed.”38 Truman answered, “I naturally am not happy over the implication that I might be ducking any issues. That is not my manner of meeting a situation.”39
Publicly, Truman endorsed Austin’s speech, despite the criticism it was receiving. It “accurately” explained this country’s position, he announced.40 Representative Emanuel Celler fired off a telegram to Truman: Austin’s statement had been “outrageously hypocritical.” He recommended yet another commission, “as if there haven’t been enough committees.”41 Freda Kirchwey was more emphatic, warning Truman that State was moving to double-cross him. “Wonder if you are aware,” she said in her telegram, “that Undersecretary Lovett has told selected group newspaper people this statement is preparation for American effort to revise partition resolution in which you played a leading role.” She could not believe, she told Truman, “that you could conceivably be partner to such action.”42
The State Department’s efforts to stall, if not to kill, partition were proceeding. One of its chief arguments was that partition would not be able to be carried out peacefully. The Commission on Palestine report to the Security Council bolstered its arguments when their report concluded that, given the continuing violence in Palestine, partition could not be implemented without an international police force.
It was only a matter of days before Secretary Marshall approached Truman as a follow-up to Austin’s speech. He wanted to inform the president that the U.S. delegation would be introducing a new resolution to the Security Council. It would call for setting up a committee to consider the situation in Palestine and advise how to carry out the U.N. resolution on partition. The Belgians would be introducing their own resolution calling for a subcommittee that would see if conciliation could be attained between Arabs and Jews. Marshall thought these efforts at conciliation would prove fruitless, and then the United States would have to reach a decision whether or not to “attempt to carry out partition.” The way things were going, he told the president, it looked as if the Security Council would not be able to proceed with partition and would refer the Palestine problem back to the General Assembly for reconsideration.43
The same day, Marshall told Ambassador Austin that he believed the interests of the Jews, Arabs, and British were irreconcilable. Eventually, Austin should give a speech emphasizing the inability of all three to implement partition peacefully. If the British gave up the Mandate on May 15 as scheduled, it was clear that there would be major fighting. The United Nations could not permit this to occur. Therefore a special session of the General Assembly had to be convened to look at Palestine again and, with the failure of conciliation, recommend that Palestine be placed under the trusteeship of the United Nations.44 A draft of the speech announcing the change in U.S. policy was written for Austin by Robert McClintock, Dean Rusk’s special assistant in the Office of United Nations Affairs, and Marshall approved it on March 5.45
On March 8, the day that Truman declared that he would be a candidate for the presidency, Marshall sent Warren Austin a note that the president had approved a draft of the next statement Austin would be delivering to the United Nations, which included the proposal of trusteeship as an alternative, “for use if and when necessary” 46 (our emphasis). In all likelihood, Truman signed it while he was aboard his presidential yacht, somewhere between St. Croix and Key West, believing that he would have the final say in any policy change as important as this one would be.
The State Department had a different interpretation. Robert McClintock then wrote to Lovett that the General Assembly would be convening a special session, and its probable outcome “will be the establishment of a United Nations trusteeship for Palestine.” That would mean a movement away from dealing with Arab aggression to “a new threat of Jewish attempts by violence to establish a de facto State in Palestine.” But State was prepared for this. It had already drawn up draft trusteeship agreements.47
It was now quite clear that the State Department was out to reverse Truman’s Palestine policy, although the president still did not want to believe it. Truman’s White House aides interceded. In March, Clark Clifford enlisted the help of the attorney Max Lowenthal to research and draft a paper for him critiquing the positions enunciated by the State Department in the previous few months against partition and making a case for it.48 Niles was also lending a hand.
The cool, restrained Clifford appreciated Niles’s and Lowenthal’s help, although he admitted that he found them both somewhat odd. “If Niles seemed a little strange,” Clifford observed, “that was nothing compared to Max Lowenthal, who was never an official member of the White House staff at all, although he came and went as he pleased…. Convinced he was under surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover, when Lowenthal wanted to discuss matters he considered sensitive, he insisted that we conduct some of our discussions on a bench in Lafayette Park.”49
Clifford’s paper began on the one point that most everyone acknowledged: “Unless immediate action is taken to preserve peace in Palestine, chaos and war will follow Great Britain’s withdrawal on May 15th.” Having been responsible for the U.N. action, Clifford argued that it was “unthinkable” that the United States fail to back the partition resolution. He made the following recommendations: First, the United States should work to get the Arab states to accept partition. Second, the United States should, if the Arabs refused to compromise, brand the Arab states as aggressors. Third, the United Nations should require Britain to comply with the resolution. Next, Clifford argued, the United States should immediately lift its unilateral embargo on arms to the Middle East, which would give the Haganah equal opportunity with the Arabs to arm itself for self-defense. Finally, the United States should help the United Nations establish an international security force in Palestine, made up of volunteer recruits.50
Clifford then sent another memo to Truman. He began by telling him that to date Palestine had not been discussed with any attention to fundamental issues. It was not a Jewish issue but one that had to be considered from the standpoint of “what is best for the United States of America.” Pointing to the ever-present issue of politics and the vote, Clifford wrote, “In advising as to what is best for America [we] must in no sense be influenced by the election this fall. I know only too well that you would not hesitate to follow a course of action that makes certain the defeat of the Democratic Party if you thought such action were best for America.”
Clifford termed the State Department’s arguments “completely fallacious.” Truman’s support of partition, he assured him, “was in complete harmony with the policy of the United States.” If he turned against it, he would be departing from already established and accepted policy, which would make him “justifiably subject to criticism.” Next, Clifford argued that partition offered the best hope to avoid war and to offer a permanent solution. To drift and delay as others advocated would lead to the military involvement the president claimed he wanted to avoid.
Turning to the new Cold War, Clifford argued that support of partition was the only course that would strengthen the U.S. position visà-vis the Soviet Union. The United States’ key interest was in the development of Western Europe, so that it could join a community of nations that would resist Soviet aggression and capitalize on the Marshall Plan politically. That could be done by cementing alliances through the United Nations. Now many Americans were in despair as they feared the collapse of the United Nations, which they had hoped would be a forerunner of world peace. Much worse, the American people, he warned Truman, felt that their own nation was “aiding and abetting in the disintegration of the United Nations…. Nothing has contributed so much to this feeling as Senator Austin’s recent statement (our emphasis)…. it seemed to be the sophistries of a lawyer attempting to tell what we could not do to support” the United Nations. U.S. foreign policy was failing, and Clifford warned that, to many, it appeared that the United States was “drifting helplessly.”
To bolster confidence and maintain an anti-Soviet alliance, it was necessary for the United States’ own “selfish interests” to support the U.N. resolution on Palestine. “We ‘crossed the Rubicon’ on this matter,” Clifford reminded Truman, “when the partition resolution was adopted…largely at your insistence” (our emphasis). To back away would lead other nations never to trust America’s commitments. If the United States retreated, he warned, Russia would move into the Arabian Peninsula, “and this is as certain as the rising of tomorrow’s sun.” Then the Soviets would portray themselves as the defenders of world peace, as the only force trying to stop a new Jewish-Arab war. As for those who argued that the United States would lose oil because the Arabs would not sell their supply to America, he answered, “The Arab states must have oil royalties or go broke.” The Saudis got 90 percent of their oil revenue from the United States, and they would not jeopardize that. “Their need of the United States is greater than our need of them.”
Concluding his argument, Clifford told the president that the people claiming that partition would not work were “those who never wanted partition to succeed and who have been determined to sabotage it.” State, he noted, “has made no attempt to conceal their dislike for partition.” If the United States were not firm, it would appear to be appeasing a few nomadic tribes, and big powers such as the Soviet Union would treat America with “contempt in light of our shilly-shallying appeasement of the Arabs.” Citing the Truman Doctrine, Clifford admonished Truman to take a similar firm stand on partition, no matter what the domestic consequences.51
Suspicions were now growing in the United Nations that the United States was changing its position on partition. The Big Five permanent members of the Security Council (the United States, Soviet Union, France, China, and Britain) were charged with holding consultations with all the parties, although Britain declined to participate. The change in the United States’ attitude was palpable. Andrei Gromyko asked Austin if all the questions the United States was asking Arab, Jewish, and British representatives “were aimed at changing the recommendations of the G.A.?” Denying that such was the case, Austin answered that they were only trying to find out if there were any modifications that might lead them to find some basis of agreement.52 By now, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie had concluded that “only the Soviet Union seemed to be seriously intent upon implementing partition; the United States clearly was not.”53 Lie told Austin that although he appreciated the United States’ attempt to see if there was any way partition could be implemented without violence, he thought it would be impossible to implement it by peaceful means. Nevertheless, it would have to be enforced. If it were not, Lie feared, “the UN would go downhill rapidly to nothing.”54
But Marshall was convinced that the partition plan could not go forward. The situation in Palestine, he informed Austin, “grows daily more fraught with danger to international peace.” For that reason, he thought, “It is…of the first importance that the Council disposes one way or another of the partition issue.” All parties agreed that it could happen only with force, and thus “the necessary conclusions can rapidly be drawn,”—i.e., a shift from partition to trusteeship was necessary.55
Austin was having qualms about so brazenly overturning Truman’s support of partition in the speech he was about to give to the Security Council. However, Rusk and John Ross, Austin’s deputy, “had succeeded in persuading Ambassador Austin that the tactics…should be adhered to.” To placate Austin, they agreed that he could say that trusteeship “would be a temporary measure” until some future settlement could be attained by both Arab and Jewish Palestine.56 This concession was necessary, Rusk said, because if Austin found himself in “outright disagreement” with his instructions he might be tempted to discuss it with Truman. Rusk was almost 90 percent sure that Austin was “back on the track.”57
It was also obvious to the Zionists that behind the State Department’s maneuvers in the United Nations lay a plan to sabotage partition. The only person who could prevent it was the president, but they did not know where he really stood. Truman was having a very negative reaction to all their lobbying and had even banned them from the White House. In his memoir, Truman was later to recall that “the Jewish pressure on the White House did not diminish in the days following the partition vote in the U.N. Individuals and groups asked me, usually in rather quarrelsome and emotional ways, to stop the Arabs, to keep the British from supporting the Arabs, to furnish American soldiers, to do this, that, and the other…. As the pressure mounted, I found it necessary to give instructions that I did not want to be approached by any more spokesmen for the extreme Zionist cause.”58
They turned once again to Chaim Weizmann, whom they knew Truman liked and respected. After the partition vote, Weizmann had stopped briefly in London and was looking forward to going back to his home and institute in Rehovoth, Palestine. But the American section of the Jewish Agency had different plans for him; it needed him in New York. Weizmann was reluctant. He no longer held any official position in the Zionist movement, and his health was not good. Finally, his protégé Aubrey Eban cabled him with an official invitation in the name of the Jewish Agency: “The most crucial phase of all now approaches here in which we sorely miss your presence, advice, activity, influence.” Returning to the United States on the Queen Mary, Weizmann and his wife landed in the city in the midst of a blizzard. Weizmann wrote to Truman on February 10, asking for an audience before Truman left on vacation for the Caribbean. That could not be arranged, Matthew Connelly responded. The president’s calendar was full.59
On February 20, 1948, Frank Goldman, B’nai B’rith’s national president, called Eddie Jacobson in the middle of the night and told him that Truman was refusing to see any of the New York City political leaders who had been imploring him to see Weizmann. He had even turned down Ed Flynn. Truman was angry “at leading American Zionists who denounced him for refusing to send American troops and supplies to fight the Arabs opposing the partition plan,” and they were afraid that the president was washing his hands of the whole matter and would let the United Nations decide what should be done. Goldman wanted Jacobson to charter a plane immediately and see Truman before he left for Key West. Jacobson was their last hope.60
Jacobson couldn’t make the arrangements but sent a telegram to Connelly asking him to give it to the president immediately. “I know that you have very excellent reasons for not wanting to see Dr. Weizmann,” Jacobson wrote. He understood more than anyone else the pressure on the president. “But as you once told me,” he wrote, “this gentleman is the greatest statesman and finest leader that my people have. He is very old and heartbroken that he could not get to see you.” Noting that he had not asked Truman for “favors during all our years of friendship,” he now wrote that I “am begging of you to see Dr. Weizmann…. I can assure you I would not plead to you for any other of our leaders.”61
Truman answered immediately. “There wasn’t anything he could say to me that I didn’t already know,” he explained. “Anyway, I had also made it a policy not to talk with anyone regarding the Palestine situation until the Security Council has had a chance to act on our suggestion for a police force to enforce partitioning.” He continued:
The situation has been a headache to me for two and a half years. The Jews are so emotional, and the Arabs so difficult to talk with that it is almost impossible to get anything done. The British, of course have been exceedingly noncooperative in arriving at a conclusion. The Zionists, of course, have expected a big stick approach on our part, and naturally have been disappointed when we can’t do that. I hope it will work out all right, but I have about come to the conclusion that the situation is not solvable as presently set up; but I shall continue to try to get the solution outlined in the United Nations resolution.62
But this meeting was so crucial that the Agency asked Jacobson to come to Washington once again and see the president when he got back from Key West. On March 12, Jacobson took a flight from Kansas City, paying his own way as always. He had spent so much of his money traveling back and forth to Washington that he apologized to his daughter Elinor that he would have nothing left to leave his children. It cheered him up when she told him the important thing was that he was leaving them his good name.63
Jacobson was very anxious as he prepared to see Truman when he returned to the White House. What could he say that would change his friend’s mind? He called Eban for some advice and told him that he was searching for ways to convince Truman to see Weizmann and thought of the president’s reverence for Andrew Jackson, whose statue was sitting in Truman’s office. Did Eban have any suggestions? Eban told him that although “no two human beings had ever walked on the face of the earth with fewer common attributes than Chaim Weizmann and Andrew Jackson,” he should go ahead and try it.64 As he had done before, Jacobson didn’t make an appointment but took his chances. At the White House, he encountered Matt Connelly, who “advised and urged and begged [him] not to discuss Palestine with the President.” Jacobson was candid, recalling “I quickly told Matt that that’s what I came to Washington for, and that I was determined to discuss this very subject with the President.”65
As always, Truman was glad to see Jacobson. After a few minutes of personal talk about their families and Jacobson’s business, Jacobson brought up the issue of Palestine. Truman “immediately became tense in appearance, abrupt in speech, and very bitter in the words he was throwing my way,” recalled Jacobson. “In all the years of our friendship he never talked to me in this manner.” He didn’t want to talk about Palestine, the Jews, or the Arabs. Jacobson then got up his nerve and began to argue with him “from every possible angle.” Reminding Truman that he had always said he revered Chaim Weizmann, he added that he could not understand why he would not give him an audience. He was an “old and sick man,” he told Truman, and he had “made his long journey to the United States especially to see the President.”
Truman remained unmovable. Referring obviously to his disdain for Rabbi Silver, Truman replied how “disrespectful and how mean certain Jewish leaders had been to him.” At that moment, Jacobson was shocked and thought the unthinkable: “I suddenly found myself thinking that my dear friend, the President of the United States, was at that moment as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be.” He was more dismayed that “some of our own Jewish leaders should be responsible for Mr. Truman’s attitude.” Jacobson was crushed and believed that his mission had been a failure. Then, as his eyes rested on Truman’s statue of Andrew Jackson, he decided to make the Weizmann-Jackson connection. He told the president:
Harry, all your life you have had a hero. You are probably the best read man in America on the life of Andrew Jackson. I remember when we had our store together and you were always reading books and papers and pamphlets on this great American…. Well, Harry, I too have a hero, a man I never met, but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived. I too have studied his past and I agree with you, as you have often told me, that he is a gentleman and a great statesman as well. I am talking about Chaim Weizmann; he is a very sick man, almost broken in health, but he travelled thousands and thousands of miles just to see you and plead the cause of my people. Now you refuse to see him because you were insulted by some of our American Jewish leaders, even though you know that Weizmann had absolutely nothing to do with these insults…. It doesn’t sound like you, Harry, because I thought you could take this stuff they have been handing out to you. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know that. If you will see him, you will be properly and accurately informed on the situation as it exists in Palestine, and yet you refuse to see him.
Truman began to drum on his desk with his fingers. As Jacobson stopped talking, Truman “turned around while still sitting in his swivel chair and started looking out the window into what in the summer is a beautiful rose garden, gazing out the window just over the pictures of his mother, his wife, and his daughter. I knew the sign. I knew that he was changing his mind.” Seconds that seemed like many minutes passed in silence. Truman suddenly swiveled around and, facing Jacobson, “looked me straight in the eyes and then said the most endearing words I had ever heard from his lips”:
“You win, you baldheaded son of a bitch. I will see him. Tell Matt to arrange this meeting as soon as possible after I return from New York on March 17.”
At that moment, Connelly entered the room. Truman immediately told him to schedule in Weizmann. It was to be an off-the-record meeting, the president said, and the press and public were not to know anything about it. Rushing to the Statler Hotel, Jacobson met Frank Goldman and Maurice Bisgyer of B’nai B’rith, who were anxiously waiting to hear Truman’s decision. Jacobson was so nervous and excited that he first went to the bar and guzzled down two double bourbons, an unprecedented act for him. The three men then made their arrangements to go to New York, where Jacobson would meet Weizmann for the first time.
Weizmann’s meeting with Truman was scheduled for March 18. The White House told Jacobson to make sure that Weizmann entered through the east, rather than the main northwest, gate, so that the press would not notice his arrival. Weizmann spoke to Truman about plans for the economic development of Palestine, the scientific work he and his associates were carrying out in Rehovoth, and the need to attain more land for future Jewish immigrants. Truman was impressed, he recalled, by Weizmann’s emphasis on the Jewish state’s need to retain the Negev. Truman explained to him why he had put off seeing him. “My primary concern,” he told Weizmann, “was to see justice done without bloodshed.” By the end of the meeting, Truman thought, Weizmann left his office with a complete understanding of his policy.66
Weizmann’s wife, Vera, recorded her own account of the meeting. She noted in her diary that after her husband returned from his meeting with the president, he told her that he had raised three points: “lifting of the arms embargo, support for partition, and increased and free immigration into Palestine.” Truman told him, in response, that the State Department was considering the embargo question and, on the point they were most concerned about, “that [Truman] supported partition.”67
All the assurances Weizmann had been given came to a shocking halt the next day, March 19, when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Warren Austin, made a speech to the Security Council as it was meeting to receive the Big Four’s report on Palestine. The report gave “clear evidence,” Austin began, that the Jews, Arabs, and Britain could not agree to implement the partition plan. If the British vacated Palestine as scheduled, Austin noted, it would lead to chaos, fighting, and loss of life. The Security Council could not permit that to happen and had the responsibility not to permit international peace to be threatened. It had to take necessary action to bring about the end of violence.68 Zionists listening to the speech reacted to the words with “joyous surprise,” the Zionist leader Julius Haber remembered. “The intimation seemed to be that at last, the United States was prepared to advocate a firm hand in Palestine.”69 Suddenly, without apparent reason, Austin asked for an intermission so that the Big Four representatives, plus Britain, could have a moment to concur.
A little less than an hour later, Austin went to the podium to resume his speech. What he said was a bombshell that reverberated through the country and the world. The U.S. government, he continued, “believes that a temporary trusteeship for Palestine should be established under the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations to maintain the peace and to afford the Jews and Arabs of Palestine…further opportunity to reach an agreement regarding the future government” of Palestine. Later that afternoon, Dean Rusk flew into New York from Washington and held a press conference announcing that the State Department was officially recommending a change in policy from partition to trusteeship.
Representing the Jewish Agency, Rabbi Silver immediately responded, denouncing Austin’s statement in a speech to the Security Council as nothing but a “shocking reversal” of the U.S. position. “We are at an utter loss to understand the reason for this amazing reversal,” he told the U.N. delegates, since it would lead to more violence and undermine the prestige and authority of the president and his administration. Not only would trusteeship not lead to peace, he pointed out, force would have to be used to implement it. It would mean the end of the sovereignty, territory, and immigration rights that were going to be established under the partition agreement. It could be imposed on the Yishuv only by force.70
Truman himself was stunned at the turn of events. He wrote in his diary:
The State Dept. pulled the rug from under me today. I didn’t expect that would happen. In Key West or enroute there from St. Croix I approved the speech and statement of policy by Senator Austin to UN meeting. This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy. The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! I am now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I’ve never felt so in my life.
There are people on the third and fourth levels of the State Dept. who have always wanted to cut my throat. They’ve succeeded in doing it.71
When Clark Clifford saw Truman in his office, he found him “as disturbed as I have ever seen him. ‘I don’t understand this,’” Clifford remembered Truman as saying. “‘How could this have happened? I assured Chaim Weizmann that we were for partition and would stick to it. He must think I’m a plain liar.’”72 Truman felt embarrassed and humiliated by his own State Department. In May he would deliver his own surprise.
Was Truman correct? Did the State Department, in fact, knowingly reverse U.S. policy on its own? It was not the first time that a speech by an administration official would appear to alter policy and Truman would deny that he had given the speaker approval.73 The State Department personnel most concerned all swore that they had given Truman the speech and that he had known what Austin was going to say, only not when the speech would be delivered. Marshall had directed Austin to make his speech on March 16, Clifford remembered, and Austin and Rusk had been told not to delay it until after the Security Council took a final vote. Marshall and Lovett, Clifford claimed, “left no word that the President was to be informed when Austin was to speak,” and that the “text of Austin’s speech was not submitted to President for his approval.”74 Years later, Clifford provided further details in an article he wrote for American Heritage, the magazine of popular history. Truman, he wrote, had authorized Marshall and Austin to propose a U.N. trusteeship only after three qualifications were met: the Security Council had to exhaust all conciliatory measures; the Council would then recommend alternatives to partition; and finally, the Council would have voted to reject partition entirely. These conditions had not been met when Austin gave his speech.75
Clifford further explained it by using a legal analogy. There had been no meeting of the minds between Truman and the State Department’s position on Palestine. Truman, according to Clifford, thought he was being presented with a contingency plan, a fallback position that he would take if he had to, but he did not want to change his policy of support for partition. The State Department, on the other hand, looked at it differently. It was convinced that partition would fail and, with their help, would be replaced with a trusteeship for which it now claimed they had Truman’s consent. Clifford did not think State had served the president well, first by not making a fight for partition and then by not discussing its decision with Truman to change the direction of American policy. Before making such an important statement, he said, it should have gotten back in touch with Truman and told him that partition “is going very badly, and we think we ought to let you know this is going to end up on our having to agree to trusteeship.”76
Although Truman did not want to believe it, Clifford thought Marshall and Lovett were not as innocent as they claimed to be. On five occasions he had told Truman that the State Department wanted to change his position. He had even taken a State Department memo to Truman as proof. But Truman had brushed off his warning and told him he was “unduly concerned.” “I know how Marshall feels and he knows how I feel. They are not going to change our policy.”77
The day after the speech, Truman convened a meeting with Clifford, Matthew Connelly, Charles Bohlen, Dean Rusk, and Charles Ross and instructed them to get the facts. The problem, Ross, Truman’s childhood friend and press secretary, wrote in a memo to himself, was that “no final check had been made with the President before Austin spoke.” Truman had thought the alternative of trusteeship would not be announced until after a final vote was taken and the Security Council judged partition impossible to achieve. “The whole business,” Ross put it, “had been handled with singular maladroitness by State. No pronouncement of the momentous nature of Austin’s should have been made without prior consultation with the President…. As it was, the reversal was without warning to the public and the President was placed in the most embarrassing position.” Now, Ross wrote, Truman was forced to accept “the accomplished fact forced upon him by the precipitate State Department–Austin action.” If the truth came out, Truman would appear “vacillating, or ignorant of something of the most vital importance…and the truth, moreover, could only have been accompanied with a wholesale repudiation of the State Department.” At their meeting, Ross recorded, Truman told them, “They have made me out a liar and a double-crosser!—We are sunk.”78
Truman called a meeting on March 24 with senior State Department officials and some White House staff. The meeting in the Cabinet Room included Secretary Marshall, Loy Henderson, Dean Rusk, Clark Clifford, Matt Connelly, Oscar Ewing, Howard McGrath, and David Niles. Truman told them he wanted to reconcile his support for partition with that of trusteeship. Clifford thought that State was acting as though they had the upper hand, especially when Henderson told the president, “That partition should be considered dead and buried.” Truman rejected this suggestion right away. After a long discussion about their options, Truman told Clifford to prepare a statement that “would seek to adapt the trusteeship proposal to partition.” Clifford worked on it all night with some of the State Department people.79
The next day, Truman formally issued a statement trying to undo the damage. Partition, he stated, “cannot be carried out at this time by peaceful means.” The United States could not impose it on Palestine with the use of U.S. troops. When the British gave up its Mandate, there would immediately be fighting and bloodshed that could “infect the entire Middle East.” Therefore, facing what Truman called “imminent” dangers, the United States proposed a temporary U.N. trusteeship that would help keep the peace after the British left Palestine. It was not, he emphasized, “a substitute for the partition plan” but only an attempt to fill the vacuum created by the British withdrawal. It would create the kind of order that would allow a final settlement. He ended by urging an immediate truce in fighting between the Jews and Arabs.80
Truman’s statement hardly helped. It was, as the private meetings suggested, an attempt to square the circle and repudiate the State Department without openly disowning the Austin speech favoring trusteeship. Few were satisfied. Eleanor Roosevelt was so upset that she threatened to resign from her position on the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. Truman, realizing that her departure would be a political disaster, told her that the trusteeship proposal was “intended only as a temporary measure, not as a substitute for the partition plan.”81
Trygve Lie, the secretary-general of the United Nations, felt betrayed by Austin. He had met with Austin before he gave his speech and told him that UNSCOP had already withdrawn trusteeship as a solution, realizing that all sides would be opposed. Lie did not understand why the United States had reversed its position. Perhaps, he thought, it was because the United States expected cooperation from the British and less opposition from the Arabs or that some in the State Department feared the effect on America’s oil interests in the Middle East. In any case, Lie regarded the turnabout as “a blow to the United Nations” and one that showed “a profoundly disheartening disregard for its effectiveness and standing.” The day after the speech, Lie went to see Austin at the Waldorf-Astoria and told him of “my sense of shock and of almost personal grievance…. This is an attack on the sincerity of your devotion to the United Nations cause.” Lie then proposed that “as a measure of protest against your instructions, and as a means of arousing popular opinion to the realization of the danger in which the whole structure of the United Nations has been placed—I want to propose that we resign.” Austin was not about to resign. “I didn’t know you were so sensitive,” he replied.82
Editorials in the most influential newspapers were almost universally critical of Austin and the White House. Even The New York Times editorialized that the fate of the Holy Land was now being “decided by expediency without a sign of the spiritual and ethical considerations.” Palestine was often called the home of the prophets, the editorial noted, and now “it would take a prophet sitting on a rapidly spinning turntable to have foreseen the course which our Government has pursued during the last few months.” The way that Palestine had been handled, the editorial continued, “has seldom been matched, in ineptness, in the handling of any international issue by an American Administration.” The United States was bowing “to Arab threats,” and proposing that the United Nations “retreat with us in the face of Arab scorn and fury.” Such a surrender was “a blow to the authority of the United Nations” and a “shabby trick on the Jewish community in Palestine.”83
The New York Herald Tribune argued that the Austin speech had been either a reversal of policy or an announcement that showed that the administration had “ignored facts which were patent to the most casual observer.” Either, it declared, was not “to the credit of the Administration.” It was, in addition, a heavy blow to the United Nations’ prestige. With trusteeship, the United States would now “merely inherit Britain’s ‘squalid war’ in the Holy Land.”84 The liberal pro-Zionist press was even more scathing. The left-wing New York paper P.M. called the day of Austin’s speech “Black Friday” and said it was evidence of “American duplicity.” The policy change, its editor wrote, revealed the “face of the deceiver,” who had led Jews “to the precipice—and then dumped them.”85 And writing in the New York Post, Editor in Chief T. O. Thackrey called the speech a “dishonorable and hypocritical betrayal of Palestine” that had challenged the integrity of the president, and nothing less than a “betrayal.”86
Eddie Jacobson was very upset. He had returned to Missouri secure in the knowledge that the president had guaranteed to back partition when talking to Chaim Weizmann. When Abe Granoff phoned him with the news of Austin’s speech, Jacobson was “speechless” and “dazed as a man could be.” In the immediate period following the speech, Jacobson could not “find one human being in Kansas City…who expressed faith and confidence in the word of the President.” But on Monday, he received a phone call in his store from Weizmann, who told him:
Mr. Jacobson, don’t be disappointed and do not feel badly. I do not believe that President Truman knew what was going to happen in the United Nations on Friday when he talked to me the day before. I am seventy-two years old, and all my life I have had one disappointment after another. This is just another letdown for me. Don’t forget for a single moment that Harry S. Truman is the most powerful single man in the world. You have a job to do; so keep the White House doors open.87
Truman felt dreadful about Weizmann. The president liked to think that people could count on his word, especially someone he had as high a regard for as Weizmann. He asked Sam Rosenman to go see him in order to explain what had happened. Rosenman reported back that when he had gone to his hotel room, he had found Weizmann calmly having coffee with Ben Cohen. Weizmann, Rosenman recounted, still had complete confidence in him. If Truman had changed his approach, Weizmann would simply overcome it. Being a politician, he was used to these sorts of things. Truman was relieved and greatly appreciated his attitude. In the future, Truman told Rosenman, he wanted to see only Weizmann if the Zionists needed to confer with him. Rosenman believed that Truman never forgot or forgave the State Department for its actions and from that point on watched its maneuvers closely and did not trust its judgment.88
Weizmann was not nearly as optimistic as he let on. He wrote a friend that the “unexpected and sudden let down by the American government will…have tragic effects.” As for trusteeship, Weizmann thought it could never work. “It is a still-born project,” he wrote, “produced on the spur of the moment by some fertile brain in the American State Department.”89 Now, from his room in the Waldorf-Astoria, Weizmann composed a lengthy letter to Truman explaining why he felt trusteeship was not the answer. First, he called attention not to the Austin speech but to Truman’s statement that he had not abandoned partition as the ultimate settlement. “I welcome this assurance,” Weizmann wrote, “because my long experience…has convinced me beyond doubt that no more realistic solution exists.” Jews and Arabs, he argued, both wanted independence, and in the areas where they made up a majority, they were “virtually in control of their own lives and interests. The clock,” he told the president, “cannot be put back” to the situation that existed before last November 29. Moreover, the psychological effect of “promising Jewish independence in November and attempting to cancel it in March” was too obvious to ignore.
It was two years since the report of the Anglo-American Committee, Weizmann reminded Truman. Yet the Jews of Europe were “still in those camps” and were subject to “dwindling resources of hope and morale,” which had been lowered after they heard of the reversal of U.S. policy. “I cannot for a moment believe,” he wrote Truman, “…that you would be a party to the further disappointment of pathetic hopes, which you yourself have raised so high.” The reversal had also led to new Arab aggression, since the Arab leaders were more confident than ever because they believed partition had been revised. The only choice for the Jewish people, Weizmann ended, “is between Statehood and extermination. History and providence have placed this issue in your hands, and I am confident that you will yet decide it in the spirit of the moral law.”90
The British would give up their Mandate in about a month. All were expecting an armed attack against the Yishuv by the Arab states, and U.S. policy was floundering. Weizmann was right: Harry Truman hadn’t chosen it, but Providence had placed a heavy responsibility in his hands.